1. Equip Managers to Improve Team Effectiveness
Help teams climb out of ruts and reach full potential.

2. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Key Insight: Situation
Organizations rely on team-based work arrangements to provide organizational benefits and to better navigate our current volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous operating environments.
Teams often fail to reach their full potential because with the benefits of teamwork comes new challenges and complexities. Teamwork involves increased co-ordination and management. It also means navigating diverse and conflicting opinions on the way to united action. All of this requires additional time, processes, skills, and behaviors.
Resolution
Use McLean & Company’s IDEA model of team effectiveness to identify team effectiveness drivers in an organized and easy-to-understand way.
Assess the team against McLean & Company’s IDEA model of team effectiveness to identify team strengths and challenges.
Facilitate a team meeting and team activities in order to address challenges and create an improvement plan.
Complication
A wide variety of behaviors, processes, and cultural factors impact team effectiveness. Making sense of team effectiveness can be intimidating for HR professionals or team members because there is no one single formula for highly effective teams.
Teams are ultimately accountable for their own effectiveness and improvement but it is unrealistic to expect teams struggling with effectiveness to fix themselves. These teams lack the very behaviors, skills, and processes required to improve themselves. Sometimes they need an impartial third party – like HR – to help them get started.
Key Insight:
McLean & Company’s IDEA model of team effectiveness identifies four factors to use in identifying team challenges and focus areas for an effectiveness improvement plan: identity, decision-making, exchanges within the team, and atmosphere of team safety.
While teams are ultimately accountable for their own effectiveness and improvement, HR can support them by offering an impactful assessment and identifying activities that teams can do to improve themselves.

3. GUIDED IMPLEMENTATION
MCLEAN & COMPANY OFFERS VARIOUS LEVELS OF SUPPORT TO BEST SUIT YOUR NEEDS
CONSULTING
“Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.”
GUIDED IMPLEMENTATION
“Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track.”
DIY
TOOLKIT
“Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.”
WORKSHOP
“We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.”
Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

4. STEP 1: Assess team effectiveness
AFTER COMPLETING THIS
STEP YOU WILL HAVE:
Met with team leads and prepared to assess team effectiveness.
Administered the Team Effectiveness Assessment.
Assess team effectiveness
Analyze assessment results and prepare for team meeting
Review progress with teams and help teams plan for continuous improvement

5. SAMPLE SLIDES

6. Teamwork and collaboration provide organizational benefits
Improved Quality of Work
Increased Employee Engagement
Teams are comprised of individuals with unique sets of skills, strengths, and knowledge that are better able to complete varying tasks and maximize results.
Research shows that teams tend to innovate faster, see errors more quickly and find better solutions to problems. (Duhigg)
Employees who responded positively to the statement "I am part of a team working towards a shared goal" are 17x more likely to be engaged.
(McLean & Company, Employee Engagement Survey, N=184,981, 2017).
Employees who responded positively to the statement "This organization has a collaborative work environment" are 2.5x more likely to be engaged.
(McLean & Company, Employee Engagement Survey, N=187,649, 2017)
Neuroscience shows that we are more motivated by positive social connections (Hills).
Improved Employee Experiences
Neuroscience shows that we are social beings who need safe human connection like we need food and water.
Working in teams improves our exposure to social connections increasing our bond and commitment to team members and the organization.

7. Challenged in making decisions Inability to resolve conflicts
Teams often struggle to realize full potential
Poor communication and collaboration
Teams must recognize and adapt to the unique communication styles and preferences of its members.
Teams often do not establish communication and collaboration expectations and norms.
Infrequent communication leads to decreased transfer of critical knowledge and limits the opportunity to build trusting relationships, both at a professional and personal level.
Too much communication can actually distract from the direct work that needs to get done:
Time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activity administration has increased by 50% over the last two decades.
At many companies, more than 75% of an employee’s day is spent communicating with colleagues and so ineffective exchanges can have a wide and profound impact.
(Duhigg, 2016)
Challenged in making decisions
Decision making is a key component of team effectiveness and becomes more challenging as organizations continue to flatten.
Establishing a team decision-making process is complicated by the fact that appropriate decision making processes vary according to the level of interdependency between team members and organizational culture.
Teams are often responsible for decisions without having proper authority.
Inability to resolve conflicts
It is challenging for teams to resolve conflicts as:
People involved in conflicts often lack an objective perspective.
Conflicts can evoke threat responses that involve highly charged emotions.
Conflicts are avoided and left unaddressed out of fear.
Often, leaders falsely assume mature adults will resolve conflicts on their own.
People fail to see how conflict can be healthy for teams if managed properly. !
McLean & Company insight
Many forces affect team dynamics and effectiveness. Drive improvement by first looking at the team as a whole before evaluating individual performance or organizational culture.

8. HR can help teams overcome challenges and barriers holding them back
A key HR responsibility is to support the organization’s human capital management by providing the knowledge, tools, and resources to foster highly effective teams throughout the organization by:
Helping teams assess and diagnose team challenges and issues.
Providing teams with the appropriate learning and training required to effectively communicate, collaborate, manage conflict and difficult conversations, and effectively lead.
Providing team members with a safe, private place to voice concerns and provide an unbiased objective perspective.
McLean & Company insight
Truly effective teams will begin to self-manage. Until then, HR is able to provide the support and resources required to truly impact teams’ effectiveness.

9. MCLEAN & COMPANY HELPS HR PROFESSIONALS TO:
Now, more than ever,
HR leaders need to help their organizations maximize the value of their people.
McLean & Company offers the tools, diagnostics, and programs to drive measurable results.
– Jennifer Rozon,
Vice President,
McLean & Company “
Empower management to apply HR best practices
Develop effective talent acquisition & retention strategies
Build a high performance culture
Maintain a progressive set of
HR policies & procedures
Demonstrate the business impact of HR
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